'San Ginese is a village in Tuscany. Many of its inhabitants travelled to Australia and America to work, and some of them returned. The Fireflies of Autumn tells of its rich, sometimes tragic life throughout the course of the twentieth century.
'These linked tales recall the fables of Italo Calvino, the intimacy and sometimes shocking candour of Elena Ferrante, and Colm Toibin's nuanced sense of migration's losses and gains. But ultimately Moreno Giovannoni is an original. In writing that appears simple, but which has great complexity and power, he offers literary style, cultural wisdom and complete immersion in a fully imagined Italian world. This is Tuscany as you have never seen it before.' (Publication Summary)
A selection of interrelated short stories.
Dedication:
For Morena, Ugo and Ichlis
who were there
and for Antoni Jach,
another fabbro
'The Everlasting Sunday is the first novel from Robert Lukins, a Melbourne writer with a background in journalism, and it’s an entirely distinctive debut: rich with atmosphere, beguiling in its blend of lyricism and quiet menace. Lukins has pointed to a year spent working as a village postman in Shropshire as his inspiration for the rural English setting, here cast in the stark monochrome of an unusually harsh winter. By contrast, the stories collected in Moreno Giovannoni’s Fireflies of Autumn: And Other Tales of San Ginese take place in the hills of Tuscany – a world coloured by turns in scorching sun and unrelenting fog. Giovannoni was born in San Ginese but grew up in rural Victoria, and has worked for many years as a freelance translator. The manuscript of Fireflies of Autumn was the first winner of the Deborah Z. Cass prize for writing by Australian writers from migrant backgrounds. The authors share a lyrical sensibility and a finely-tuned sense of how the fantastical and the mundane, the hopeful and the brutal, are woven together in the stories which define our communities.' (Publication summary)
'How strange it is the way the idyll of life in a Tuscan village can animate a literary mind with tall tales and true of a past that is partly gritty realism and partly a dreamt-up extravaganza of the panorama of life on the Italian land, where every beast is a creature of poignancy as well as poetry, but everything lilts like a fairytale even if the smell of the earth is rich with the reek of manure.' (Introduction)
'Moreno Giovannoni's The Fireflies of Autumn is a collection of loosely connected short stories, describing life in the Tuscan village of San Ginese. Reviewer Chris Saliba spoke to the author.' (Introduction)
'How strange it is the way the idyll of life in a Tuscan village can animate a literary mind with tall tales and true of a past that is partly gritty realism and partly a dreamt-up extravaganza of the panorama of life on the Italian land, where every beast is a creature of poignancy as well as poetry, but everything lilts like a fairytale even if the smell of the earth is rich with the reek of manure.' (Introduction)
'Moreno Giovannoni's The Fireflies of Autumn is a collection of loosely connected short stories, describing life in the Tuscan village of San Ginese. Reviewer Chris Saliba spoke to the author.' (Introduction)
'The Everlasting Sunday is the first novel from Robert Lukins, a Melbourne writer with a background in journalism, and it’s an entirely distinctive debut: rich with atmosphere, beguiling in its blend of lyricism and quiet menace. Lukins has pointed to a year spent working as a village postman in Shropshire as his inspiration for the rural English setting, here cast in the stark monochrome of an unusually harsh winter. By contrast, the stories collected in Moreno Giovannoni’s Fireflies of Autumn: And Other Tales of San Ginese take place in the hills of Tuscany – a world coloured by turns in scorching sun and unrelenting fog. Giovannoni was born in San Ginese but grew up in rural Victoria, and has worked for many years as a freelance translator. The manuscript of Fireflies of Autumn was the first winner of the Deborah Z. Cass prize for writing by Australian writers from migrant backgrounds. The authors share a lyrical sensibility and a finely-tuned sense of how the fantastical and the mundane, the hopeful and the brutal, are woven together in the stories which define our communities.' (Publication summary)
